Climate Science Glossary

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All IPCC definitions taken from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I, Glossary, pp. 941-954. Cambridge University Press.

1970s Climate Papers

It is a recurring myth that global warming has stopped and the Earth has begun to cool. This graphic summarizes data that refutes a related myth that publications now supporting the scientific consensus that the world is warming due to increased carbon dioxide were predicting in the 1970s that the world would cool. A survey of peer-reviewed scientific papers from 1965 to 1979 by Peterson et al. (2008) shows that few papers predicted global cooling (7 in total), while significantly more papers (42 in total) predicted global warming. (Also see the original figure from the paper)